Tag Archives: Methodology

Over the years, I have encountered and practiced many different ways of creating, documenting, and executing tests. I have also worked with a number of testers, including myself at times, who harbored strong opinions about how tests should be handled. As a result, I’ve found that the “right way” to handle tests depends upon your environment and your team.

If we look at the methodology and maturity of any team’s development life cycle, we will see that certain approaches to testing are better suited than others. For example, a waterfall team that has a high turn over rate will get more value out of high detail, scripted tests because there will be a smaller product knowledge base among testers. Alternately, an Agile team dedicated to a project/product will likely benefit from more generalized tests and exploratory testing. A company’s culture, regulatory bodies, and procedures also play into how testing is performed and documented.

With this in mind, it is important for testers to keep an open mind and consider their processes carefully. Small changes can result in major savings in time and costs. A good example of this would be changing the test team’s charter from exhaustive to risk-based testing. This change will quickly switch their focus from reviewing every possible combination of data paired with a complete review of the system’s functionality to examining the changes and identifying the sections of the software with the greatest need for testing, which typically results in a significant reduction of test time. As a counter-point to that example, there are situations in which the team may need to perform more in-depth testing, such as when there is a major refactoring and the project is disturbingly light on unit tests.

The point of my ramblings here is that as professionals, we should focus on learning and improving our skills and finding solutions to our pain points rather than arguing over who’s methodology is better. The reason there are so many ways to approach testing is because each situation is different and cannot be handled by a one-size-fits-all solution. Keep learning and remember there is no right or wrong way, it’s just a different style.